25 Dark Poems for When Readers Want to Explore the Shadows

Though poetry can be full of light and laughter, it can also capture sorrow, pain, and the fragility of life. In the best cases, these dark poems give us catharsis. They verbalize the shattered mirror through which we occasionally catch glimpses of our world.

I can’t help but love poetry like this, and these dark months of winter have inspired me to share a few of my favorites. Below is a collection of full poems, excerpts, and poetry readings that walk in shadow. They contain darkness in all of its forms: grief, death, anxiety, rage, despair, loneliness, jealousy, doubt, heartbreak, and betrayal.

Though you probably shouldn’t read dark poems every day, sometimes they are exactly what you need.

There are cemeteries that are lonely,graves full of bones that do not make a sound,the heart moving through a tunnel,in it darkness, darkness, darkness,like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,as though we were drowning inside our hearts,as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

if only we could paint diceto wait on the windowsillWait for a guestWait for a moment of your prideor patienceAnd let it beDusty or keptChoice of an armreaching as far as your hands can touch your faceDo you cry or rest

Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,We will come back to earth some fragrant night,And take these lanes to find the sea, and bendingBreathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.We will come down at night to these resounding beachesAnd the long gentle thunder of the sea,Here for a single hour in the wide starlightWe shall be happy, for the dead are free.

On my desk is a photograph of youtaken by the woman who loved you then.In some photos her shadow fallsin the foreground. In this one, her body is not that far from yours.Did you hold your head that waybecause she loved it?

I cannot forget the sugar on the table.The hand that spilled it was not that ofmy usual father, three layers of clothesfor a wind he felt from hallway to kitchen,the brightest room though the lightbulbswere greasy.

They say I looked back out of curiosity.But I could have had other reasons.I looked back mourning my silver bowl.Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.So I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the righteous napeof my husband Lot’s neck.From the sudden conviction that if I dropped deadhe wouldn’t so much as hesitate.From the disobedience of the meek.Checking for pursuers.Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind…

Before dawn, trembling in air down to the old river,circulating gently as a new seasondelicate still in its softness, rustling raimentof hopes never stitched tightly enough to any hour.I was almost, maybe, just about, going to do that.

We lovedlike we fought, slugging our way toward each other,sending up flares to announce our advance. And when our cityburned, we stood in the ashes, and admired each other’sbodies. Now I ask you: how will we managewithout the steadiness of our long unhappiness?

Childhood? Which childhood?The one that didn’t last?The one in which you learned to be afraidof the boarded-up well in the backyardand the ladder to the attic?The one presided over by armed menin ill-fitting uniformsstrolling the streets and alleys,while loudspeakers declared a new era,and the house around you grew bigger,the rooms farther apart, with more and morepeople missing?The photographs whispered to each otherfrom their frames in the hallway.The cooking pots said your nameeach time you walked past the kitchen.And you pretended to be dead with your sisterin games of rescue and abandonment.You learned to lie still so longthe world seemed a play you viewed from the muffledsafety of a wing. Look! Inrun the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,turning over the furniture,smashing your mother’s china.Don’t fall asleep.Each act opens with your motherreading a letter that makes her weep.Each act closes with your father falleninto the hands of Pharaoh.Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,still a child, and slow to grow.Still talking to God and thinking the snowfalling is the sound of God listening,and winter is the high-ceilinged housewhere God measures with one eyean ocean wave in octaves and minutes,and counts on many fingersall the ways a child learns to say Me.Which childhood?The one from which you’ll never escape? You,so slow to knowwhat you know and don’t know.Still thinking you hear low songin the wind in the eaves,story in your breathing,grief in the heard dove at evening,and plenitude in the unseen birdtolling at morning. Still slow to tellmemory from imagination, heavenfrom here and now,hell from here and now,death from childhood, and both of themfrom dreaming.

If these dark poems have whet your appetite for the brooding side of life, you can also read these poems about death or some of these dark books.

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